RPG Project - Post 8

I'm not all that sure what area of my project I should be working on next. So I thought I'd procrastinate a little and do up a journal post since it's been awhile. I wanted to have a video to go with this post but I don't have the capture software handy and when it is handy I never think of it. So here's a quick screenshot:

It doesn't look much different from anything I had before. The only obvious difference is the slimes. They sort of lunge about in random directions at the moment and if they collide enough times with a tree the tree disappears as if the slime has eaten the tree. They also "eat" any flowers or grass they come into contact with. The "eating" doesn't seem to occur exactly when you expect them to though and I think that's due in part to the collision boxes being smaller than the sprites.

Right now you can attack the slimes though they don't attack back. When you hit one it's sort of pushed off a bit in the direction of the attack. They can take somewhere from 1 to 4 hits before they just disappear.

The lunging movement of the slimes was kinda fun to work on (a video would be really good here, sorry). At first they looked kinda like they were just gliding along the ground, about what you might expect from a sprite being updated in one direction with no acceleration or anything applied. The lunging movement was just done such that when processing movement and there's a speed in some direction, before actually moving you first play through an animation where the bulk of the slime shifts to one side. Once that animation completes, you start to actually move the slime for awhile before essentially starting the process over again.

Other stuff I've done since the last journal post:

Load various settings (like season and some world gen stuff) through xml file.

Added half-assed progress indicator in title bar for island generation.

Added grass sprites and made grass mounds change colour depending on season selected.

Considered changing colour of leaves for seasons and otherwise making tree sprites a little more dynamic.

Some work on layering bugs (still not perfect but better).

Added a "schedule event" queue.

There's a lot of stuff that I would like to do yet, some little things and some quite a bit larger. Like:

See about getting a sky box in instead of the black background.

See about planting flowers on a more regional basis rather than the current technique.

Give a purpose to flowers and grass.

Create some sort of inventory system.

Create a player health system.

Fix up attack swoosh locations and ranges.

Implement PC's floating hands.

Make it possible to descend into the caves.

Leave logs when a tree is chopped.

Make it possible to build a structure (maybe).

Create a monolithic marker stone in the center of the island.

Do some work on the scrolling boundaries.

Get some path finding stuff added.

Refactor code.

Improve timing code.

Lots of other stuff, I could go on and on and on.

There is so much to do but none of it really pushes me towards having an actual game. I still just have this world populated with a bunch of stuff with a little bit of interaction available but no game. I know what my overall goal is, at least for the first iteration (escape the island by creating a portal), but I'm not sure yet how to go about making it an entertaining experience. The slimes were supposed to be enemies to contend with but with the general goal and story I have in mind they're more likely to be a form of wildlife than a full on threat. I need some sort of underlying challenge other than just getting the stuff together to form a portal and escape.

It kinda sounds like there's been quite a bit of development since my last post but there's been about a month where no work has been done at all. Having recently become the father of twin boys, I took 4 weeks off in June for parental leave to figure out what the new life routine will be. Other than having a lot of stuff crammed into our house that we don't really have room for and a sort of sense that I'll perpetually be worried about their future, everything is going really smoothly.